March 21 letters: Jeremy Clarkson: Bully or the people’s hero?

WHAT a nasty spiteful little article from Miles Salter, director of the York Literature Festival, condemning Jeremy Clarkson (The Yorkshire Post, March 17)..

You can almost feel that air of intellectual snobbery and superiority dripping from his pen.

How could people possible listen to Jeremy and watch Top Gear? What ghastly frightful people they must be!

Well Miles you say you’ve got 3,000 advance ticket sales, The petition in support of Jeremy is approaching a million, but of course they’re all just sad according to you.

I’d rather listen to Jeremy any day in preference to that awful Guardianista Polly Toynbee and when you see Jenni Murray of Woman’s Hour please ask her when the BBC will be having a daily Men’s Hour.

Perhaps they could get Jeremy Clarkson to present it. You’re outnumbered Miles, it’s called democracy

From: S. Acaster, Sheffield.

The validity and logic of Jayne Dowle’s comments (The Yorkshire Post, March 16) on Jeremy Clarkson were mixed, to say the least. Just where IS this commentator in all this?

She describes a man, she acknowledges to be routinely, gratuitously, offensive to various sections of society as ‘naturally witty’.

From: HO Griffiths, Littledale, Pickering, North Yorkshire.

RE Jayne Dowle’s article (The Yorkshire Post, March 16) on Jeremy Clarkson and the BBC.

Despite Ms Dowle’s lightly veiled idolatry of Jeremy and her less lightly veiled demonisation of the BBC, she really has to get her brain into gear and realise that Jeremy Clarkson is the ultimate bully.

He is the number one purveyor of swaggering arrogance and irresponsibility with regard to his dealings with anyone or anything that gets in his way.

As for the BBC, I hope they will finally aspire to regaining a little moral credibility, by sacking Mr Clarkson and axing Top Gear for good!

Size matters to consumers

From: Father Neil McNicholas, Yarm.

THE consumer organisation ‘Which?’ seems to have suddenly woken up to the fact that consumers are being ripped off by reductions in the size of products (‘Consumers hit as products grow smaller’ The Yorkshire Post, March 18).

This has been going on for a long time now – we see it all the time. Chocolate biscuits such as Penguin and Wagon Wheel, and chocolate bars such as Snickers, are mere shadows of their former selves. The external wrapping may look the same size, but when you pick one up and squeeze it you find you are paying for a lot of empty space.

It’s the same with boxes of chocolates. They may look the same on the outside but the chocolates themselves are much smaller, not nearly as ‘deep’ as they used to be, and much of the space inside the box is taken up by vastly excessive plastic moulding. Eggs don’t come as well shielded.

And when you write to manufacturers to point out the blatantly obvious and ask them why this is happening, they deny all charges, claiming that we are looking back to when we were kids when everything appeared larger. Do they think we are stupid?

We’re not talking about back when we were kids, we are talking about just a year or two ago when the state of the economy began to bite (no pun intended). That’s when the changes began to take place and it was an obvious ploy – gradually reduce the size and therefore the raw materials being used, but keep the price the same – no one will notice. Well we did.

Back in your hole, troll

From: ME Wright, Grove Road, Harrogate.

IN 20 years of letters to The Yorkshire Post, I have received a number of postal replies; some pleasant and signed; others somewhat less so and, needless to say, anonymous. Trolls are not new, but the internet has allowed their sad, sick minds full reign without even the cost of a stamp.

Your Editorial ‘Tackle the trolls’ (The Yorkshire Post, March 17) rightly demands “an effective way of stopping this”. The Press do not publish untraceable letters. Is it really beyond the wit of the technophiles to make it impossible for anonymous messages to be sent via the internet?

Arms and the schoolboy

From: Ronald Fairfax, Princes Avenue, Hull.

YOUR feature on reading projects in schools (The Yorkshire Post, March 5) brought to mind the story of the little boy from the West Riding whose grandfather found him looking a little sad.

Grandad asked him what was wrong. The little boy told him that they were reading about the war at school and the teacher had told the class to bring any souvenirs into school that parents might have at home. The boy said he had asked his father, but Dad didn’t have anything.

Grandad pondered a while and said suddenly that he thought that his old army great-coat was around the tank in the loft. The little boy exclaimed in wonder: “Oooh, Grandad, have you got a tank?”

Aberrant apostrophes

From: Dick Appleyard, Saxilby, Near Lincoln.

RE the letter by Canon Michael Storey (The Yorkshire Post, March 14). It seems to me that Mother’s Day logically refers to your mother’s (special) day and Mothers’ Day logically refers to all mothers’ (special) day for the logical reason of where the apostrophe is, in the word ‘mothers’.

But I believe that the rules of our English language say that Mother’s Day and Mothers’ Day is the same meaning and the same thing and we have to accept that.

This year, Mothers’ Day fell on the Ides of March (March 15) when Julius Caesar was assassinated in the year 44BC.